Automated Technology Integrations for Customer Satisfaction Assessment

Introduction

The current financial crises have brought about tremendous pressure to business of all sizes alike. This leads to the nosedive of customer’s demand and confidence. With the increment of the challenges to have their business survived in the competitions, customer relationship has become the essential asset for businesses to pursue prosperity. To accentuate the importance of customer relationship in business, Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) has been widely implemented in many foresighted companies’ business strategies to deliver a more effective and efficient way of marketing, selling, and servicing customers. CRM covers the 3 stages as shown in Figure 1 which are Marketing stage, which mainly focus on attracting customers by setting up promotions and advertisement, Selling and Delivering stage, which conducts business activities to sell products or deliver services to customers, and Customer Servicing stage which provide the after-sales services to retain customers and build customer loyalty.

Figure 1.

Three stages of Customer Relationship Management

According to the research from Gray et al. (2001), it is 5 to 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than obtain repeat business from an existing customer. They also stated that 5% of the increment in retaining existing customers is able to provide more than 25% increment of profitability. In order to effectively and efficiently build customer loyalty and retain customers, customer satisfaction is needed to be carefully and correctly addressed in the stage 3 of the CRM. Thus, it can be convenient and time saving if technology component such as automatic customer satisfaction assessment tool is adopted in their business. The advancements of technology and the internet have changed the ways of business activities operates nowadays. Phone calls, video-conferencing and social media tend to be the predominant ways to interact with customers. These communication tools provide the ease of meeting face-to-face with customers, and saves travelling time and cost at the same time. Thus, automatic customer satisfaction assessment can be helpful if it can be enclosed in the conversations with customers.

Background

This section covers the essential background information which allows automated technology integrations for customer satisfaction assessment. The presented background information reveals how the technology utilizations of communications tools are normally utilized in business activities so that the automatic assessment tool can be supportive in these real scenarios.